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Guidance - Branching for each Sprint

Explains how using a separate version control branch for each sprint in Scrum improves code stability, release management, and team collaboration over using labels.

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There are a lot of developers using version control these days, but a feature of version control called branching is very poorly understood and remains unused by most developers in favour of Labels. Most developers think that branching is hard and complicated. Its not!

What is hard and complicated is a bad branching strategy. Just like a bad software architecture a bad branch architecture, or one that is not adhered to can prove fatal to a project. We I was at Aggreko we had a fairly successful Feature branching strategy (although the developers hated it) that meant that we could have multiple feature teams working at the same time without impacting each other. Now, this had to be carefully orchestrated as it was a Business Intelligence team and many of the BI artefacts do not lend themselves to merging.

Today at SSW I am working on a Scrum team delivering a product that will be used by many hundreds of developers. SSW SQL Deploy takes much of the pain out of upgrading production databases when you are not using the Database projects in Visual Studio.

With Scrum each Scrum Team works for a fixed period of time on a single sprint. You can have one or more Scrum Teams involved in delivering a product, but all the work must be merged and tested, ready to be shown to the Product Owner at the the Sprint Review meeting at the end of the current Sprint.

So, what does this mean for a branching strategy?

We have been using a “Main” (sometimes called “Trunk”) line and doing a branch for each sprint. It’s like Feature Branching, but with only ONE feature in operation at any one time, so no conflicts Guidance - Branching for each Sprint

Guidance - Branching for each Sprint

Figure: DEV folder containing the Development branches.

I know that some folks advocate applying a Label at the start of each Sprint and then rolling back if you need to, but I have always preferred the security of a branch.

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Why take the chance of having a problem rolling back or wanting to keep some of the code, when you can just abandon a branch and start a new one?

It just seems easier and less painful to use a branch to me! What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Scrum   SSW   TFS 2008   TFS 2010   ALM   Branching   Version Control

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